“My father should die in prison”

Warning: This story contains depictions of sexual violence

It was 8:25 p.m. on a Monday night in November 2020 when Caroline Darian got the call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was her mother Giselle Pellico.

“She told me that she had discovered that morning that (my father) Dominic had been drugging her for about 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Darian recalled in an exclusive interview with Emma Barnett of BBC Radio's Today program 4.

“At that point, I lost what was a normal life,” says Darian, now 46.

“I remember screaming, crying, even insulting him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. Tsunami.”

Dominic Pellico was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the end of a historic three-and-a-half-month trial in December.

More than four years later, Darian says her father “should die in prison.”

Fifty men who Dominic Pellico recruited online to come rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Giselle have also been jailed.

He was caught by police after wearing a top in a supermarket, prompting investigators to take a closer look. In the laptop and phones of this seemingly harmless retired grandfather, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Giselle, apparently unconscious, being raped by strangers.

In addition to thrusting issues of rape and gender-based violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted the little-known problem of chemical subjugation – drug-facilitated assault.

Caroline Darian has made it her life's battle to fight chemical addiction, which is considered underreported because the majority of victims have no memory of the assaults and may not even realize they were drugged.

In the days following Giselle's fateful phone call, Darian and her brothers, Florian and David, traveled to the south of France, where their parents lived, to support their mother as she absorbed the news that – as Darian now puts it – her husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years”.

Soon after, Darian herself is called by the police – and her world comes crashing down again.

They showed her two photos they found on her father's laptop. They showed an unconscious woman lying on a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

At first he couldn't tell that the woman was her. “I experienced a dissociation effect. I had a hard time recognizing myself from the beginning,” she says.

“Then the officer said, 'Look, you've got the same brown mark on your cheek … that's you.' Then I looked at those two photos differently … I was lying on my left side like my mother, in all her photos.”

Darian says she is convinced her father also abused and raped her – something he has always denied, despite offering conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know he drugged me, probably for sexual assault. But I don't have any evidence,” she says.

Unlike her mother's case, there is no proof of what Pellicote may have done to Darian.

“And this is the case for how many victims? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They are not listened to, they are not supported,” she says.

Soon after her father's crimes came to light, Darian wrote a book.

I'll Never Call Him Dad Again explores her family's trauma.

It also delves deeper into the issue of chemical subjugation, where commonly used drugs “come from the family medicine cabinet.”

“Painkillers, sedatives. Those are drugs,” Darian says. As with nearly half of chemical bondage victims, she knows her abuser: the danger, she says, “comes from within.”

She says that in the midst of the trauma of finding out she had been raped more than 200 times by different people, her mother Giselle found it difficult to accept that her husband might also have assaulted their daughter.

“It's hard for a mother to integrate all of that at once,” she says.

Yet when Gisele decided to open the trial to the public and the media to reveal what her husband and dozens of men had done to her, mother and daughter were unanimous: “I knew we had been through something…horrible, but that we had to come through it with dignity and strength.”

Now Darian must figure out how to live knowing she is the daughter of both the tormentor and the victim – something she calls a “terrible burden”.

Now she is unable to remember her childhood with the man she calls Dominic, only occasionally returning to the habit of calling him her father.

“When I look back, I don't remember the father I thought he was. I look straight at the criminal, the sex offender that he is,” she says.

“But I have his DNA, and the main reason I'm so involved with the invisible victims is also a way for me to distance myself from this person,” she tells Emma Barnett. “I am completely different from Dominic.

Darian adds that she doesn't know if her father was a “monster” as some have called him. “He knew very well what he was doing and he was not sick,” she says.

“He's a dangerous man. There's no way he's getting away. There's no way.”

It will be years before Dominic Pellico, 72, is eligible for parole, so he may never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Pellicotts are recovering. Giselle, Darian said, is exhausted by the process, but also “recovering… She's doing well.”

As for Darian, the only thing she cares about now is raising awareness about chemical bondage — and better educating kids about sexual abuse.

She draws strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old child — her “beautiful son,” she says with a smile, her voice full of affection.

The events that unfolded on that November day made her who she is today, Darian says.

Now this woman, whose life was ruined by a tsunami on a November night, tries to look only forward.

“You can watch the full interview The Pellicott Trial – The Daughter's Story – on Monday at 7pm on BBC 2 or on the iPlayer. If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this film, details of help and support can be found at bbc.co.uk/actionline'.